Nintendo has a lot of franchises at their disposal. They have Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Wario Land, Donkey Kong, and even cute Kirby, though there is one series, Starfox, which has been kind of under the weather since its release on the Gamecube and DS. Let’s hope they come up with a sequel for the Wii. For the time being, let’s talk about one of the best Nintendo 64 games of all time, Starfox 64 for the Nintendo 64.
The plot of the game revolves around the Lylat System, which is under the rule of the evil emperor Andross. The first team tried to stop him, but ended up with the team leader dying, one member going on the evil side, and the last member surviving and telling the leader’s son that he died. A few years later, Fox is now the leader of the new Starfox team, and he is up for taking down Andross’s evil army and saving the whole system from Andross’s evil grasp. So, yeah, it’s your basic revenge plot, but I don’t think a lot of people really care about that since this happens to be one of the best games on the Nintendo 64 and one of the best games of all time.
The game play style is in the form of a 3D shooter where you control Fox and his ship as you shoot down multiple enemies in a fixed 3rd person rail-shooting game. kind of like Vanark on the Playstation. You have your basic laser weapon, and you can hold it to charge it into a homing laser, but you can also power it up twice which turns your weak gun into a stronger one. You also have the famous bomb that takes out everything on the screen and can cause massive damage to a boss. Your main ship has a lot of abilities, like it can do a barrel roll that can deflect shots, you can shake off enemies that are behind, you, and go into an all range mode and fly around in a 360 environment in certain boss fights. In some missions, you can go into the Landmaster, which is a tank, and go on the ground and shoot guys from below and above.
The graphics are impressive for the time. The best part of the game was how much voice acting was in the game. The Nintendo wasn’t really famous for having voice acting in its games, but some, like this game, Conker’s Bad Furday, and Turok have some fluid and clear voice acting. It wasn’t digitized or anything, and it’s just amazing that a cartridge could do this much. The music is also very nice, and fun to listen to. It puts you right in the setting of the planet and the situation. This game, even though it’s old, still holds up to today’s standards as one of the best 3D games of all time.
Let’s get into our ships and shoot down the bad parts. The whole game is linear. You go from planet to planet and you can’t go back to old planets if you wanted to try other routes. I kind of find that annoying. Sometimes, your allies can get really irritating, especially Slippy Toad. since he doesn’t do anything except show the boss’s life bar. It’s like they all rely on you to take care of them, and in the final fight against Wolf and his team, it gets really maddening, really fast.
All and all, this happens to be one of my most favorite games of all time. It also happened to be the second game I owned. It’s a really fun title and has some replay value. I would highly recommend buying it for the Nintendo 64 or off the Virtual Console. So, yeah, you heard what I said. Go out and buy it! Let’s just hope they can come up with another Star Fox game for the Wii.
This game gets a 9 out of 10.
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